In October 2009, a man and two women walked into a renowned Los Angeles restaurant called The Hump and ordered some sushi. This seemingly innocuous act was the start of a fascinating chain of events that would involve hidden cameras, genetic sequencing, a few arrests, and the first solid proof of an illegal international trade in whale meat.

The man in question was Charles Hambleton, a keen diver and assistant director of The Cove, an Oscar-winning documentary that exposed the annual killing of Japanese dolphins. Hambleton had heard that The Hump was serving whale meat and decided to investigate.

He and his companions ordered an “omakase meal”, a challenging assortment of different meats chosen by the chef, only offered to the “adventurous”, and priced at a hefty $800. Sure enough, the platter included four strips of whale sashimi. The receipt said as much, but Hambleton wanted proof. When the waiters and chef weren’t looking, he slipped a sample of the meat into a plastic bag and sent it to Scott Baker from Oregon State University.

By sequencing the meat’s DNA, Baker confirmed that it came from an endangered sei whale. In fact, the meat was an exact genetic match to products bought in Japan in September 2007. The whale in question must have been killed in those years during one of Japan’s controversial “scientific hunts”. From there, its meat had been illegally exported to the US, flouting a strict ban on the international trade of whale meat.

Together with Cove director Louis Psihoyos, Hambleton took his evidence to officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). When the duo returned to California to attend the Academy Awards, they conducted their final stings. Psihoyos says, “Charles and I did two more operations to buy whale meat from the same restaurant with federal officials watching so we could establish a chain of custody.” The Hump was forced to close its doors a few weeks later. On 10 March 2010, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against both the restaurant and its chef.

The Hump wasn’t the only restaurant to be stung by the team. They found whale meat being sold in other diners in LA and Seoul, proving that the international trade spanned South Korea as well as the US. The Seoul restaurant served no less than 13 whale meat products, which came from minke, sei and fin whales, and one Risso’s dolphin. Once again, genetic analyses revealed that the fin whale meat came from a single animal that had been caught in Japan and had been sold in Japanese markets since September 2007.

Baker is just one of a wave of scientists who are using modern scientific techniques to track the trade of endangered species. Last year, Jacob Lowenstein found that some sushi restaurants were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna, despite claiming otherwise. And Ullas Karanth used photo-recognition software to match illegally sold tiger skins to animals once photographed in India’s national parks.

Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research says that it aims to provide “information on the role of whales in the ecosystem and the effects of environmental changes on whales”. It allegedly studies population structures, age and diet, although critics are hardly convinced. Baker says, “It is widely recognised that scientific whaling is primarily a front for limited (but expanding) commercial whaling.” And Psihoyos adds, “There has not been a single peer-reviewed paper the Japanese whalers have done since 1987, when their “scientific whaling” program began, to justify the killing of a single whale.”

Under the banner of research, Japanese boats kill minke, Bryde’s and sperm whales, as well as the endangered sei and fin species. Meanwhile, whales are sometimes killed as “bycatch”, ensnared within fishing nets that target smaller swimmers. If caught in this way, their flesh can be sold commercially, and they sell very well. Despite this thriving national trade, it’s generally assumed that Japan’s slaughtered whales stay within national boundaries.

The IWC regulates 13 species of whale and according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), none of these species can be traded commercially between countries. Japan, Iceland and Norway have permits that allow for some limited trade between each other, but they’re absolutely forbidden from trading whale products with countries that don’t hold permits, including the US and South Korea. Nonetheless, this new study clearly shows that this legislation is being flouted.

Both Norway and Japan keep DNA registers of whales that are killed for “scientific” purposes, or that are sold after being accidentally killed. You could easily work out if a suspicious product came from an authorised source by comparing it to these registers. But neither country makes their records freely available, even to the IWC’s Secretariat. Nor have they sanctioned market surveys to monitor the origins of whale products.

Baker says that independent surveys and open access to the registers are vital for controlling trade and confirming that countries are staying within their catch quotas. “Like the smuggling of drugs, we cannot hope to stop illegal trade in wildlife,” he says, “but we can impose monitoring and inspection schemes to limit and prosecute these cases.” To that end, Baker’s team have submitted a request to the Government of Japan, via the IWC Secretariat, to access the country’s whale DNA registers.

There are 11 Comments. Add Yours.

Daniel J. Andrews
April 13, 2010

Reminds me of some of the tales found in the book, Bottom Feeder. Essentially, unless we, the consumers, change our fish-eating preferences our future seafood diet may consist of things like jellyfish, as we’ll have unsustainably eaten our way to the bottom of the food chain.

This, coupled with the Japanese refusing to protect endangered species, makes me think it is more likely than not we’ll have an ocean wasteland devoid of larger species in a hundred years or less.

Allen Collins
April 14, 2010

This is a great write up. Science in action!

In case anyone is interested, my wife and I (mostly she) wrote a high school lesson that takes students through the steps that Scott Baker and Steve Palumbi took when originally sequencing whale meat sold in asian markets. http://www.paleobio.org/MysteryMeat/

Lizzy Wilbanks
April 14, 2010

@Allen Collins

What a great lesson plan! I wish I had students to use it with Very nifty website.

JM
April 14, 2010

So they’re serving two year old whale?

Sam W
April 14, 2010

Horrible! I guess the problem also lies with the mentality of the Japanese. If they aren’t willing to give it up, it is always going to be a huge struggle to enforce anything – although I would not have expected whale meat in the US!
I would be more for funding some educational campaigns in Japan. Not being an expert on either the Japanese culture or whale poaching, I can’t say what Ansatz (to borrow a mathamatical term) to use but I’m sure it can be done. On the other hand, I’m not sure what is done in that direction currently – if anyone has information on that kind of thing, I’m sure it’d be very interesting.

oxjr
April 14, 2010

I have never meet a dumb Japanese person, so how does the culture not exercise some restraint when it comes to these animals. Ok it is culturally important to you to eat them, but if you eat the last 5 or 6 of them then your culturally screwed anyway, leave them be for a few decades and maybe you can return to your traditional hunt….or maybe you will find a new tradition.

Maybe our impression of the Japanese as being smart is incorrect, and they actually have a huge population of Japanese Sarah Palins.

Captain Skellett
April 14, 2010

$800!!!

jdmimic
April 15, 2010

@Collins: Great idea! Thanks for sharing.

@Sam W: Sadly, I have met plenty of people in the US that find it even more “thrilling” to hunt illegal animals than it is for them to hunt legally. Thre rarer something is, the more valuable it becomes. I have met plenty that kill illegal animals simply because they dislike the “gubment” telling them what to do. I knew a guy once that, when told he couldn’t dedge a creek running along his property because it contained very endangered Madtom catfish, he bulldozed dirt into the creek. When officials complained, he just laughed and told them that since the catfish were all dead now, they shouldn’t mind him dredging the creek. He had no problems possibly wiping out a species so he could make a few bucks on gravel and he is hardly unique.

@oxjr: Ed has posted many articles demonstrating just how poor people are at long term thinking. Even if it is perfectly obvious, distant consequences rarely invade our immediate actions.
As should be apparent to anyone watching the news, humans as a species are criminally stupid. But civilization wise, we are children. We can only hope we grow up before we kill ourselves (as a parent, I often wonder how we survive until adulthood on an individual basis and I have bright children).

Frank
April 16, 2010

Quite frankly I just don’t get the commotion about species dying out.
It’s obviously not for the love of animals or pity, or just about everyone should be vegans.
Just about everyone is okay with animals being tortured (intentionally and almost sardistically in lab tests or just out of profit, when stuffed in small boxes) and killed for our sake.

So what is it, I’ve yet to heard a proper answer to that, everyone I’ve asked always just stares at me like I’m some psychopath.
Yet the all fail to provide an argument.

So what, a species dies.
That’s the whole idea of nature, right ?
Species go extinct and make way for others to expand and evolve.

sati
April 20, 2010

it is gross to eat whale. it is disgusting

niki
October 10, 2010

9. Frank Says:
April 16th, 2010 at 1:15 pm

Quite frankly I just don’t get the commotion about species dying out.
It’s obviously not for the love of animals or pity, or just about everyone should be vegans.
Just about everyone is okay with animals being tortured (intentionally and almost sardistically in lab tests or just out of profit, when stuffed in small boxes) and killed for our sake.

So what is it, I’ve yet to heard a proper answer to that, everyone I’ve asked always just stares at me like I’m some psychopath.
Yet the all fail to provide an argument.

So what, a species dies.
That’s the whole idea of nature, right ?
Species go extinct and make way for others to expand and evolve.

Do you consider yourself as evolving if you go and kill a couple of whales, not because your are hungry or because of natural selection, but because of your greed and the need to make more money to go and destroy something else? That’s not the whole idea of nature. You won’t evolve simply by destroying everything around you. If you set your apartment on fire, where would you go to live?

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